Economico for Usage-based & API businesses
Usage revenue and usage cost on the same meter
Platform fees plus metered usage, billed and booked correctly, so you can see where revenue and margin come from. Run by your AI agent.
"Usage pricing is easy to announce and extremely hard to run"
Announcing $0.02 per call takes an afternoon. Running the business behind it is the hard part, because two meters now move together and pull in opposite directions: revenue follows how much your customers use, cost follows the infrastructure that serves them, and the number that decides whether you have a business — gross margin — lives in the gap between them. Most teams charge usage confidently and only learn what it cost them at the end of the month.
Charging is the easy meter — your billing tool already nails it
A committed platform fee, metered per-call usage, pure pay-as-you-go with no minimum — the invoice goes out fine. That was never where the pain was. The trouble starts the moment that usage has to become books: revenue that shows up as one lump, no split between what's committed and what's consumed, and no trace of what serving those calls actually cost. Every shape of usage pricing lands correctly here:
- Flat platform or base fees as recurring revenue.
- Metered usage billed per call or per unit.
- Pure pay-as-you-go, with no minimum.
- Agent-native rails for per-call settlement, including stablecoin where you use it.
The hard meter is the accounting — and it's the same meter
The reason margin disappears is that revenue and cost get recorded in different places, on different rhythms, keyed to nothing in common. Economico books both against the same usage. Base fees and metered consumption post to distinct revenue accounts; the hosting, bandwidth, and third-party data behind the service post as cost of revenue against the right product. Because both sides key off the meter, gross margin isn't a spreadsheet you rebuild — it's a figure your books already carry.
Platform vs. usage
Base fees and metered usage post to distinct revenue accounts, so you can see how much of your revenue is committed versus consumption.
Infra and data as COGS
The hosting, bandwidth, and third-party data behind your service are recorded as cost of revenue, against the right product.
Profit you can read
Because revenue and cost both key off the usage meter, your agent can tell you the gross margin on each customer.
Bill usage by asking
Invoice a month's platform fee plus metered usage in one instruction; your agent posts it to real books.
Now you can see which customers actually make you money
The pain you can't see is the one that decides the company: a heavy user can be your worst account if the infrastructure to serve them eats the fee. When revenue and cost sit on the same meter, that stops being a guess. Your agent reads gross margin customer by customer — so a repricing conversation, or the decision to grow a segment, runs on a fact from your books instead of a hunch.
A usage-based startup's first quarter · in journal entries
Two meters, one ledger.
Scroll through PulseMeter API's first quarter — platform fees plus metered events on the revenue side, metering and warehouse costs on the other. The same meter, accounted.
Incorporate and raise
Rafa and Jun put in $20,000 and close a $130,000 angel SAFE. Financing, not revenue — the books know the difference.
4 tool calls
Economicocreate_share_class✓- Economicoissue_shares✓
- Economicoissue_shares✓
- Economicorecord_safe✓
A plan with a meter on it
SignalForge signs: $1,500 platform fee plus $0.01 per event. January's meter adds $450.
4 tool calls
- Economicocreate_party✓
- Economicocreate_plan✓
- Economicocreate_contract_from_plan✓
- Economicocreate_invoice✓
Usage cost meets usage revenue
OpenMeter and ClickHouse charge the card — the cost side of the same meter. January nets $300.
4 tool calls
Gmailsearch_gmail_messages✓- Gmailread_gmail_message✓
- Economicoreceive_bill✓
- Economicoreceive_bill✓
The meters run higher
February: SignalForge's events climb, and PacketPilot comes aboard metered-only.
3 tool calls
- Economicocreate_invoice✓
- Economicocreate_invoice✓
- Economicosend_invoice✓
The margin question
Revenue per customer next to the metering, warehouse, and enrichment costs that served it.
2 tool calls
- Economicoget_income_statement✓
- Economicosummarize_revenue✓
The quarter closes
Three customers, two revenue lines, one set of books that ties.
2 tool calls
- Economicoget_income_statement✓
- Economicoget_balance_sheet✓
Ask it to bill the usage, then tell you what it earned
Invoice Nova Analytics for the $1,500 platform fee plus 500,000 API calls at $0.02 this month.
Record this month's $34,000 CDN and bandwidth bill as cost of revenue.
What's my gross margin per customer after infrastructure and data costs?
What you'll use
The money loop, tuned for usage-based & api businesses.
Get started
The finance team you don't have to hire.
Hand your agent the setup guide and it walks through the rest — real books from day one, no dashboard, no finance hire.